The present invention relates to methods and systems for representing natural language statements.
Methods and systems directed at communicating across different natural languages, for example French and English or Spanish and Italian, are well known. One commonly known system is a language translator, such as Babblefish (babelfish<dot>altavista<dot >com) or Google's translator (www<dot>google<dot>com/language_tools). However, prior language systems, such as language translators, have many disadvantages. One such disadvantage of prior systems is their inability to robustly process semantic versus literal meaning. For example, prior systems commonly translate statements from one language to another by providing a literal translation, i.e. a word-by-word translation of the statement. Unfortunately, literal translations often yield significant errors in meaning because they fail to account for the semantics of the statement as a whole and how semantic meaning translates from one language to another. In general, prior systems have failed to provide a means for representing language statements in a form, which is generic to language type and accounts for, for example, semantics, the functional roles of each of the words in the language statement, and common ambiguities, such as idioms, functional incongruities, and anthropomorphic constructions.